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He strode past them, ignoring the way North smirked and Theo frowned, and disappeared through the doorway. A moment later, his voice came back to them as he said, “Marcy, have Parker throw them out if they don’t leave.”
Then the sound of the front door came, and North pushed back his chair.
“It’s your turn,” Shaw said.
“Rock, paper, scissors.”
“No! It’s your turn. I drove into those safety cones and spilled my ice cream, remember?”
“And I inspected those manholes—say something, pipsqueak, I dare you.”
Auggie closed his mouth, but his grin was huge.
“Jesus,” Theo muttered.
“Rock, paper, scissors,” North said.
Shaw tried to cover North’s fist. “No, it’s your—”
“One, two, three, shoot—”
At the last minute, Shaw went with paper. North threw scissors.
“Two out of three,” Shaw said.
“Go.”
“North!”
“Come on, you can show off for Theo.”
Shaw gave Theo a look. Theo did seem to be appropriately attentive, so Shaw sighed and said, “Fine. Theo, maybe you’d like to take notes or something. For posterity.”
“Uh huh,” Theo said. But he didn’t reach for pen and paper, which wasn’t, in Shaw’s opinion, a good sign.
“You two,” North said, “keep whoever comes in here busy. If they ask, we went to the bathroom.”
“Together?” Auggie asked.
“Keep it up, pocket protector, and I’ll take six more inches off.”
Auggie rolled his eyes at that.
Shaw took the lead, and he left the conference room and followed the hallway that led deeper into the office.
A voice from behind stopped him: Marcy. “Excuse me?”
Shaw glanced back, smiled, waved. “It’s ok. I’m just getting some water. I’ve got to take this pill because if I don’t, North says I turn into a jackass, which isn’t very nice, but it is a tiny bit true on account of a hex. Or maybe it was a curse. Or maybe an enchantment.”
“It’s an antifungal,” North said, “because he picked up this weird skin thing from a donkey he was boinking—oh Christ Almighty!” He rubbed his ribs where Shaw had gotten in an elbow. “But he does have to take it.”
Marcy frowned.
“It’s fine,” Shaw said, “I was watching this whole show about people who have to force feed their partners pills, you know, shoving it to the back of their throat and then holding their mouth shut, and then one person is choking and gagging, and sometimes they’re kicking with their hind legs, and the other person is squeezing their snout and stroking their throat—”
“It was an infomercial,” North said, “for those little treat pouches where you put pills for dogs, in case the ‘snouts’ and ‘hind legs’ didn’t tip you off. Two AM and I want to sleep, and this jackanapes won’t turn off his computer because he’s high as giraffe balls. He thought he was witnessing domestic violence. The only good thing about it was he got Jay out of bed at half-past three and made him come over, the dumbass.”
Marcy was staring at them.
